“Forgive me!” In a moment he was all penitence—­overwhelmed with compunction.  “Forget it!  I’ve behaved like a brute.  I ought to have seen that you were worn out.”

He was beside himself with remorse.

“It’s all right, Antoine.”  She smiled forgiveness at him.  “Only I felt—­I felt I couldn’t stand any more to-night.  I suppose it’s taken it out of me more than I knew—­the shock, and fainting like that.”

“Of course it has.  You ought to rest.  I wish Mrs. Grey were in.”

“Is she not?”

“No.  The maid told me she was out when I came, and she hasn’t returned yet.”

“She’s been held up by the fog, I expect,” answered Magda.  “Never mind.  I’ll sit here—­in this big chair—­and you shall switch off these glaring lights and play to me, Antoine.  That will rest me better than anything.”

She was a little sorry for the man—­trying to make up to him for the pain she knew she had inflicted a moment before, and there was a dangerous sweetness in her voice.

Davilof’s eyes kindled.  He stooped swiftly and kissed her hand.

“You are too good to me!” he said huskily.

Then, while she lay back restfully in a chair which he heaped with cushions for her, he played to her, improvising as he played—­slow, dreaming melodies that soothed and lulled but held always an undertone of passionate appeal.  The man himself spoke in his music; his love pleaded with her in its soft, beseeching cadences.

But Magda failed to hear it.  Her thoughts were elsewhere—­back with the man who, that afternoon, had first rescued her and afterwards treated her with blunt candour that had been little less than brutal.  She felt sore and resentful—­smarting under the same dismayed sense of surprise and injustice as a child may feel who receives a blow instead of an anticipated caress.

Indulged and flattered by everyone with whom she came in contact, it had been like a slap in the face to find someone—­more particularly someone of the masculine persuasion—­who, far from bestowing the admiration and homage she had learned to look for as a right, quite openly regarded her with contemptuous disapproval—­and made no bones about telling her so.

His indictment of her had left nothing to the imagination.  She felt stunned, and, for the first time in her life, a little unwilling doubt of herself assaulted her.  Was she really anything at all like the woman Michael Quarrington had pictured?  A woman without heart or conscience—­the “kind of woman he had no place for”?

She winced a little at the thought.  It was strange how much she minded his opinion—­the opinion of a man whom she had only met by chance and whom she was very unlikely ever to meet again.  He himself had certainly evinced no anxiety to renew the acquaintance.  And this, too, fretted her in some unaccountable way.

She could not analyse her own emotions.  She felt hurt and angry and ashamed in the same breath—­and all because an unknown man, an absolute stranger, had told her in no measured terms exactly what he thought of her!